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The crop of drying cod was spread out on the flakes, as usual, and tiny specks of women and children were bending over them, turning the fish, piling them up, bearing some of them away on hand-barrows, and bringing fresh loads to scatter in the sun. When we reached the house we found Daddy lying on the steamer chair. He was engaged in deep converse with our skipper, who left at once.
The actual processes and actual conditions are exhibited to him he is taught to observe. Cities are no longer black specks on maps and continents are not just pages of a book. The shop shipments to Singapore, the shop receipts of material from Africa and South America are shown to him, and the world becomes an inhabited planet instead of a coloured globe on the teacher's desk.
As the ship sailed on, the sea-gulls of the northern ocean were succeeded by the high towering tropic-birds, several of which were seen; appearing at first like mere specks in the blue sky, where, with the wonderful balloon apparatus with which they are furnished, they floated calmly at their ease, then suddenly descending like bolts from the skies, they pounced down upon the nether world, to seize some hapless fish swimming unconscious of danger near the surface of the ocean.
The very lamp-lighter, who ran on before, dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamp-lighter that he had any company but Christmas.
He found it, and almost ran along the boggy shore of Idwal, looking back every now and then at the black wall of the Twll du, in dread lest he should see two moving specks in hot pursuit.
My back was turned towards the distant Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see the old lights away on the spits of sand, I saw them over my shoulder. I knew the limekiln as well as I knew the old Battery, but they were miles apart; so that, if a light had been burning at each point that night, there would have been a long strip of the blank horizon between the two bright specks.
But there was a dash of white at her throat and some white lilies of the valley in her bosom, and a white feather in her great black hat poised with a Gainsborough swagger on the mass of her bronze hair. "It's the spring," she added. "Yes," said I, "it's the spring." She approached me and brushed a few specks of dust from my shoulder. "You want a new suit of clothes, Simon."
When the Parisian took up his eye-glass to examine the strange accessories of this dwelling, the joists of the ceiling, the color of the woodwork, and the specks which the flies had left there in sufficient number to punctuate the "Moniteur" and the "Encyclopaedia of Sciences," the loto-players lifted their noses and looked at him with as much curiosity as they might have felt about a giraffe.
One can fancy how the men and the women of Palos watched the specks of white sails vanishing in the west, and how, as each frail bark in turn disappeared in the great ocean, mothers and sisters turned weepingly away as if from a last farewell at the grave of their sailor kinsmen. Columbus was now fairly afloat, and we may say with Milton, that The world was all before him, where to choose.
But he was on the alert, for he did not know but that the animal would play another trick at any instant. "Go on, old boy!" he muttered. "We've got miles and miles of prairie ahead of us. Run till you are tired! But remember, you've got to carry me back," he added, grimly. Soon the ranch house and the corral were mere specks in the distance, and then even these faded from view.
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